Earth Defense Force 6 is a love letter to the franchise, mixing a compelling story (something I never would’ve thought writing for an EDF game), a ton of gameplay to go through, creativity with new content and a rethread of some old hits with a twist. The most fun I had with an EDF game for sure and a great game all around. I’m really happy they’ve made this!
I’m not going to get into the story too much, because it’s genuinely interesting to see and wonder where they’re going with it most of the time, missions from past EDF games mingle with new content in a logically consistent manner and your role in the story changes as things progress. At some point the game even pulls a small twist where you have to progress non-linearly to continue, and this was pretty great. Some of the talking sections of specific missions are too long, non-interactible and non-skippable, and it wasn’t that fun when you have to restart these maps, but overall I don’t have anything bad to say here.
Gameplay is as solid as it has ever been, you get into huge fights with tons of enemy aliens that you need to shoot down with a wide range of weaponry and special abilities spread across four character classes with their strengths and weaknesses; From machine guns to orbital strikes, pneumatic hammers to automatic turrets, laser canons to homing explosive roombas and vehicles to pilot, there’s a wide range of gear to collect and level up. I sometimes wish that the difference between tiers of weapons was more visible, or that you would never get level ups that do ‘nothing’ but it’s still a fun ramp from start to finish.
You’ll still fight ants, spiders and robots, but they’ve added a ton new enemies, most of them my favorites in the franchise yet. Kamikaze rushing robots with giant glowing bombs for arms, squids that remind me of Metal Slug aliens, grappling-hook fligning bots, there’s a lot of variety there. The game suffers a bit from a balancing issue where some missions will be really really tough all of a sudden and grinding isn’t much an option because you increase your maximum health really slowly, but when that happened we kicked the difficulty down for that mission and moved on. It doesn’t feel great, but it’s an option we had.
You should play EDF6. Great gameplay, a neat story and really the best this franchise has to offer (yet!)
